W HATEVER the major forces that impelled Weaver into his career as a communIcator may have been, povert) was not one of them His i) father, Sylvester, Sr., who is now in his seventies, went West as a youngster and made good as the head of a roofing-materials company in Los Angeles. Sylvester, ] r., was born there on December 21, 1908, the first of four children (he was followed by Sylva, Rosemary, and Winstead, who is now a professional comedian and better-known as Doodles 3) Weaver), and bv the time he reached his teens, hIs fa- ther had become a minor California millionaire-a quiet, conservative man, prominen t in Los j\ngeles country-club circles and for a while president of the cit)'s Chamber of Com- merce. Weaver's moth- er-she died in 1939- was an attractIve woman who wrote poetry, com- posed music, and played LJ ') the balalaika. Family con - ';/ versation at the Weavers' was a mixture of business, politics, and the arts, and at an early age Sylvester, Jr., showed hImself adept at all three. As a high- school student in Los An- geles, he went in for dra- matics and school politics, and during his summer vacations he took a job in his father's firm. In 1 926, he entered Dartmouth, w here he was generally reckoned a fast man with a Vlarmon His scholastic record, however, did not suffer . "You hardly ever saw Pat crack a book, but he got straight A's all the way through," a former classmate recalls. \Veaver, ma- jorIng in philosophy, made Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, and graduated, in 1930, nlagna cunl Laude. Then he set off for Europe to ponder his future. 44 that is moving toward mu- 1') tancy-there isn't much J change ") But the future is something else. To \\T eaver, the future, with television to guide it, is un- limited. The age of the communicator is at hand. returned to New York, which he found in the depths of the depression. By this time, Weaver's father had sold his busi- ness, whIch meant that, although the family was stil1 very well off, there was no comfortable desk space in Los Angeles to which \\T eaver could re- treat until times got bet- ter. Making the best of a gloomy situation, \\1 eav- er got a job in New York selling stores on the idea of a giveaway magazine that would have their names printed on the cov- er, as a promotIon stunt The magazine, Weaver now points out, was the forerunner of the highly successful magazines that are currently distributed by supermarkets, but few of the store managers he canvassed thought much of its potentialities. "I had a few hot prospects but no sales," Weaver says. "The job only last- ed a few weeks." Dis- gusted, he returned home to Los Angeles, where, by letting it be assumed that hIs New York job had been a sales-promo- tion project of some mag- nitude, he was hired by Young & MacCallister, an advertising and print- ing firm. His assignment was to think up du-ect- mail advertising schemes and sell them to business- men, who would, in turn, give Young & MacCallis- ter the printing work in- volved. He made out fairly well at this-one of his customers was the Security- First National Bank of Los Angeles, to KoVd. which he sold the idea of giving a handy house- hold-budget book to its customers-but after awhile it struck him as a rather tepid way to earn a liv- ing, and he found himself thinking more and more of the possibilities of a career in commercial radio, which was Just be- ginning to come into its own on the West Coast, as elsewhere. In the fal] of ] 932, when he was twenty-three, he managed, with the help of a friend, to get himself taken on by Station KH], in His first stop was Paris. "1 joined the group at the Dôme, trYIng to be a writ- er. Didn't work out," Weaver says cryptically. He visited a number of Mediterranean ports as a passenger on a coastal steamer, and journeyed up the Nile to the dam at .LJ\.swan, where he lin- gered over the ruins of one of the for- tress outposts of the Roman Empire, and then, after stopping off again in Paris,